"Sometimes a franchise just has a big, black mark over it and no amount of wishful thinking can turn the tide..."-Jaap Still

"Brilliant use of an instructional picture book."-Kyle in Newport News

"Does Met$tra have a gambling problem?"-Erik Love

"Hasta la vista baby. I throw up the white flag."-Joe

"I'm still a fan, but enough is enough."-Meet the Mets

"I watch the grass grow - it's more exciting."-David

"Freaking Chipper Jones. I HATE Freaking Chipper Jones."-Dave Murray

"Good God man, what have you done??!! You've released the genie from the bottle. I see the showers and toilets backing up at Shea, emergency landings at LGA, unusual tides in Flushing Bay, and when they break ground for the new stadium the construction gang will unearth and disturb some ancient Indian burial ground for unlucky and cursed members of the Iroquois nation...Blaspheme no more Metstradamus! You are tempting the fates!"-The Metmaster

Monday, August 17, 2009

I didn't mean to be back so soon, but I finally got to read the actual quotes regarding the concussions of David Wright and Ryan Church that our fearless leader came up with today, so I wanted to relay them to you while underlying the fact that our manager is slowly becoming the Gangsta Art Howe:

"You have to be careful into stereotyping individuals. David is a different animal, so to speak. How he is made up is a little different than, say, Ryan Church, in my opinion. That's not to say that one is better than the other, but they're different. With Ryan, there was always something thrown from leftfield - 'We need to check that.' That made it somewhat difficult to evaluate that particular situation."

Check that ... Art Howe was never this petty. Clueless, at times. Petty, never. It took a beanball to bring out the truth but here it is. Laid out on the table ready for you to ingest and then puke.

So the question is this: What makes this different than the Minaya/Rubin situation? Well for one, Rubin was around to defend himself. Ryan Church is in Atlanta preparing for a rain delay, and probably never saw this coming.

Manuel was probably intending to pay a compliment to Wright, calling him "tough" and what not, but ended up blasting Church in the process, making him look like a sniping ingrate. Gee, maybe the "particular situation" was "difficult" because he had a freakin' concussion!!! Concussions, by nature, are difficult. And guess what, tough brains bruise in much the same way as brains that are "thrown from left field".

If Ryan Church was bad in the clubhouse, if he stole his teammates' iPods and programmed them to play only Leo Sayer songs, if he dangled babies off the roof of Citi Field, say so. Clue us in on the joke as to why he was such a bad guy. Until then, he's gone. You jerked him around, then you traded him. Let it go. And stop dancing around the issue and being all coy. It makes you look petty, and petty is not a good look. Petty, combined with absolutely wrong, is a fashion faux pas.

I don't know if that's the issue, but if that's the reason, i.e. that Manuel can't deal with religion in the clubhouse, he should give it up, because it's all over. To note an obvious example, Gary Carter was one of the most obnoxious bible-thumpers there ever was, but somehow, managers dealt with him. Church may very well be a fundamentalist bigot, but the manager's job is to win games, not worry about philosophies; you play the best players you have. Period.

The Washington Post article was from 2005! Don't you think if Church was bothering teammates with his beliefs you may have seen some hint of it somewhere? Jerry Manuel is a classless, self-important, condescending jerk, and he owes Ryan Church an apology. If he comes out with anymore Church-bashing, I hope Ryan quits being so nice about it and lets him have it.